Hacker News: willm

New comment by willm in "Self-updating screenshots"

willm — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 04:55:21 +0000

I approve of this approach.

The docs for Textual (TUI library for Python) build screenshots along with the docs. Technically not really screenshots, they are SVGs, but principle is the same. They never get out of date.

https://textual.textualize.io/widgets/markdown/#example

A full-featured terminal user interface for hledger plain-text accounting

willm — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 13:52:27 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/thesmokinator/hledger-textual

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47739663

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

A Textual widget for beautiful diffs in the terminal

willm — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 16:30:19 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/batrachianai/textual-diff-view

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47651048

Points: 12

# Comments: 1

New comment by willm in "Building a TUI is easy now"

willm — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 08:07:00 +0000

What TUIs are you referring to? Mouse is supported and working on just about every TUI framework.

New comment by willm in "Building a TUI is easy now"

willm — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 21:57:52 +0000

It is possible. Terminals have supported mouse interactions for a long time.

That's AI [video]

willm — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 09:38:45 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEVl0NS0vu8

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46943414

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New Year's Fireworks Simulator in Your Terminal

willm — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 14:10:58 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/willmcgugan/ny2026

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46444178

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by willm in "Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal"

willm — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 16:06:06 +0000

I know for a fact that Textual can generate an entire frame in less than a 60th of a second. Any lag you see has nothing to do with the choice of language. A TUI just doesn’t require that much number crunching to use a low level language.

I’d be interesting in knowing what platform and terminal you observed the lag, when testing Toad.

New comment by willm in "Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal"

willm — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 12:33:11 +0000

Not saying there isn't room for improvement. This is the first release, and work is ongoing. But I can't predict everyone's assumptions. Everyone brings their own experiences to the table, and in 6 months of testing nobody has made assumptions you just did.

For instance, "toad run" takes a path to a directory and not a command (check the usage). You've made an incorrect assumption about how that works, based on previous assumptions on how the UI works.

I would be like to understand why you made the assumptions you did, and make changes based on your feedback. But you've chosen to be combative, for reasons known only to yourself.

For the record, I apologize for the "Mr cranky pants" quip. If you do want to improve this software, join the Discord. Let's keep it civil. Merry Xmas.

New comment by willm in "Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal"

willm — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 10:36:17 +0000

De nada.

New comment by willm in "Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal"

willm — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 09:54:28 +0000

It’s stored statically in the Codebase. In the future, I suspect there will be enough compatible agents that there might be a web service to search them.

I think they are working in the Copilot ACP layer. Doubt it will take long.

New comment by willm in "Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal"

willm — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 09:26:08 +0000

It is quite literally instantaneous on my 5 year old laptop. Whatever you are seeing isn't due to the choice of Python.

New comment by willm in "Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal"

willm — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 09:23:35 +0000

Thanks!

New comment by willm in "Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal"

willm — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 09:23:12 +0000

The ACP protocol supports MCP. That would be how the client provides additional functionality for the agent. There's no UI in Toad for that yet, but there will be in a future update.

New comment by willm in "Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal"

willm — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 23:27:38 +0000

It should be as easy as running: toad acp “command”

New comment by willm in "Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal"

willm — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 23:13:59 +0000

You may be confusing Agent Communication Protocol with Agent Client Protocol. Yeah, 2 ACP protocols. I had no hand in the naming.

If an agent can be configured to use Ollama, then you could use it from a Toad. It might be possible right now.

New comment by willm in "Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal"

willm — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 22:54:21 +0000

Pretty sure I could run Toad in Toad, but I’m scared to try.

New comment by willm in "Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal"

willm — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 22:48:20 +0000

I don’t follow your first question. Toad already displays pretty diffs. MCP works in the same way as the native CLI.

One of the advantages of Toad is that it is vendor agnostic. In the future Toad will be able to run sub agents, and allocate any agent to any job. Still to figure out the UX for that.

New comment by willm in "Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal"

willm — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 22:42:25 +0000

That’s pretty much it. You can bring your own agent. Including OpenCode by the way. I doubt they will mind as they still get paid for the tokens.

You get a nice UI that is only going to get better as time goes on.

It’s far better model to separate the agent from the UI. The current situation is like building a browser for a single website.

New comment by willm in "Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal"

willm — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 22:08:40 +0000

Hope you like it. It is still Claude Code doing the work. Toad talks to the agent, and is the agent that works with the LLM. So the results should be identical to the native CLI.